With some delay after the collapse of the concept of an all-inclusive nation, and beginning with the early critical assessments by Benedict Anderson as well as Eric J. Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, a plethora of examinations of the concept of citizenship, the legal membership in (nation-) states, and notions of belonging and identification has been and is being published. The seventeen essays in this collection fit well into the debate, provide a many-faceted picture of the limitations of citizenship in Canada’s past, but also mark a particular, bounded stage of framing research.

In the introduction the three editors provide a succinct, heavily annotated summary of the state of the debate as conducted in Canada. The essays are meant to reflect “the diverse experiences of citizenship in Canadian social history” (p. 12).  Who “imagined” Canadian citizenship, in which contexts, and with which goals? Beginning with the early post-national initiation of a debate about citizenship by T.H. Marshall and his – for the time – thoughtful comments on social citizenship, the editors highlight critical reactions to the concept and contrast it with the narrow positions of “race purity,” cleanly bodies, and a “forging” of Canadian citizenship in connection with the World War One “killing fields of Vimy Ridge” (p. 23).  They note, as others have, that in most public and political debates no common denominator was ever defined: neither the nous in Quebec’s maîtres chez nous, nor the unum of e pluribus unum in the U.S.  With no common understanding ever agreed upon, it was easy for gatekeepers of all kinds to decide to use their own predilections in making some people Canadians and excluding others or Others.

Janine Brodie, like the other contributors to this volume, takes an empirical approach and outlines three imaginations of citizenship, the legal one, a rights one, and, most recently, a governance one. She uses the throne speeches as source and thus provides a perspective on authoritative views. It is interesting to note that neither in the speeches nor in Brodie’s essay does the concept of identification or belonging have a role.  Using a different kind of source, the citizenship debates at the time of the 1885 Franchise Act, Veronica Strong-Boag makes clear that alternatives to the mainstream – as so often meaning a white, well-settled malestream – were available in the marketplace of ideas. People who belonged to and identified with the society but were not admitted as members of the polity made their voices heard. The concepts vigorously advocated by women’s, First Peoples’, and Asian immigrants’ spokespersons were not listened to by those at the centre of policy-making (and politicking). They did not care to buy new ideas, to move out of the confines of their traditions and interests.

In francophone Canada the situation was no better, according to Ronald Rudin.  As regards First Nations, Claude Denis writes that even in the present, judges, who finally begin to adjudicate treaty rights, rely on yesteryear’s anthropology and demand that “Indians” must have stayed the same cultural persons they were (in legal imagination) when, as independent societies, they negotiated the treaties.  If, since the French Enlightenment, politically active citizens born with inalienable human rights have been considered the strength of democratic societies, it is legitimate to ask why gatekeepers of Canada’s (and other societies’) norms have been so intensely learning impaired.

Each of the following essays addresses one particular issue and, of course, the front-stage actors who held the power of definition, including:  housing reform (Sean Purdy), the New Industrial Citizenship (Jennifer Stephen), indispensable housewives ineligible for citizenship (Denyse Baillargeon), leisure rights (Shirley Tillotson), and Frontier College masculinity (Lorna R. McLean). We learn about those excluded: children as wardens of some governmental or other agency (Robert Adamoski), boys and girls considered delinquent (Joan Sangster), (hetero-) sexual offenders (Dorothee E. Chunn), “unfit” citizens whose “mental hygiene” was found wanting (Robert Menzies), and Afro-American women in Halifax who were deprived of education (Bernice Moreau). We learn about models of citizenship –  surprisingly few, though: the experts’ version of modern mothers (Katherine Arnup), and what experts considered sexually “normal” teens (Mary Louise Adams). With so many unworthy persons in the country, the experts, whether excluding or model-building, seem to have faced a Herculean task, but men that they were (a few women did join in this struggle), they valiantly excluded whosoever did not fit their particular version of clean, masculine, and white citizens. It is a depressing picture that the authors present and, though this was never an explicit intention of the volume, it is the harshest indictment of those who considered themselves Canada’s elites that this reviewer has read. As regards exclusion, the volume may be considered almost encyclopaedic.

However, this volume, too, suffers from the bane of Canadian historiography: frequent references to an undefined Britishness and to an equally undefined (Anglo-) Canadianness. To describe the latter, James Woodworth’s often-invoked “a certain definite something that at once unites us and distinguishes us from all the world besides” (1909; cited p. 317) is less than enlightening. Franco-Canada’s most prominent characteristic seems to be certain definite but conflicting positions in historiography. Loyalty to the British crown, which Canadians are said to have felt, may neither be equated with affinity to British ways of life (p. 21) nor even be postulated by scholars if they use the designation “Canadians” inclusively. Were Jewish, Chinese, Norwegian, Jamaican, or other immigrant women, men, and children enamoured with some kind of Britishness? In Brodie’s reading of the throne speeches, this rhetorical Britishness seems already to have excluded the Scottish and Irish cultural input (p. 43), not to mention English workers’ and women’s cultures. Britishers, mostly in the English version, included thoughtful statesmen as well as incapable remittance men as well as, and this is perhaps the most important group, many immigrants who Canadianized and did so explicitly. The Duke of Connaught’s 1914 proclamation that the “greatest duty that devolves upon Canadians is to make Canadians of those who are coming to Canada’s shores from other lands” (cited p. 234) would also have needed some clarification on what Canadians considered themselves to be at the time. In view of the achievements of social-cultural historians as regards differentiation of social groups, deconstruction of self-ascriptions, and analyzing myths and symbols, it should be possible to be more precise about either anglo- or francophone Canadians who came from the French-language territories of the continent or from the British Isles.

The rhetorical Britishness also taints analytical approaches of several authors. T.H. Marshall, as focused on Britain as he was, has had a major impact beyond the isles, on the continent, and perhaps even beyond Europe on other societies. In the survey of the literature of the field, only books with Canadian, British, or U.S. places of publication are cited. This may be called a provincial perspective. There is a world beyond monolingual English scholarship, in particular in a society and academia that proclaim themselves to be multicultural. Among U.S. historians a movement to internationalize U.S. history has had an impact for a decade or more under the slogan of de-provincializing U.S. history. Most of the essays of this book remain within the scholarly realm of the former British Empire’s Atlantic segment – a de-provincialization is needed. For example, the essay on the leisure movement and citizenship in Canada would have benefited from contextualization:  from early nineteenth-century mechanics’ movements through the labour movements to twentieth-century achievements of the eight-hour day, the leisure debate among the Atlantic world’s working classes has revolved about the time needed to act as informed citizens and assume responsibility in the polity.

It might be time to listen carefully to the voices of those excluded. And several authors provide tantalizing sources: speeches in the franchise debate or Black women’s assertion that they were part of society and were short-changed by officials who only “gave their own” rather than all Canadians (p. 295).  Under wardship, boys protested that they wanted to learn something (p. 324) and girls emphasized “I have certainly done my share” (p. 327).  The Montreal immigrants studied by Micheline Labelle and Daniel Salée, the Aboriginal societies studied by Julie Cruikshank or Claude Denis, the children in wardship whose story Robert Adamoski recreates, or the women who participated in the citizenship debates and raised children – they all created feelings of belonging for themselves and they created Canadian societies and Canada’s society in the process. We may find belonging and civic activity in everyday lives rather than in gatekeeper pronouncements. The anthology under review emphasizes pronouncements on who did not belong; the next step is to study those who paid no attention to moral, racial, or other exclusionary discourses and considered themselves Canadians.

Dirk Hoerder
University of Bremen